Creating exercise habits when you are super busy is more important than any other time. Exercise keeps your body strong, productive, and energetic so that when you are operating at maximum capacity, your capacity is optimum. Staying fit and healthy adds enormous value to your life and career.
Without your health, it eventually becomes impossible to get anything done from a hospital bed or a grave-site.
Exercise is one of those paradoxical and counter-intuitive principles in life. Exercise takes time, effort, and energy. It sometimes isn’t the most fun thing to do especially if you are forced to do it while traveling or in a time crunch. It’s so much easier to skip it under the premise that you’ll pick it back up when life isn’t so busy and when you have more time. Think back on your life and find a time when “life just wasn’t so busy….not one right?” So, don’t think putting off exercise until life is not so busy will ever happen. That formula never ends well for anyone.
The more you ignore your health, the more it will ignore you.
“You won’t always love the workout, but you’ll always love the results.”
Earlier in my accounting career, I got into a long and terrible funk of NOT exercising. I was working a lot of hours, was always stressed, and justified skipping my workouts because I was feeling so tired. I didn’t feel like going to the gym. I was crunched on time and had so many things to do that seemed more important. The last thing I felt like doing was something that didn’t make me immediately happy. That’s what I told myself anyway.
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I put on weight.
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I grew even more tired.
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I was even more stressed.
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I felt even worse about myself.
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I kept trending south.
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Something eventually had to give.
Many others make the same mistake that I was making. I thought that exercise had to entail going somewhere, joining an expensive gym that was miles out of my way and took up even more time commuting back and forth. I thought exercise required me to stay on some funky cardio machine for what seemed like hours staring at a wall or a TV monitor that was on a channel that I had no interest in watching. Or, I thought that exercise was pumping iron so hard that my arms and legs would fall off.
But exercise doesn’t have to be mindless work on machines nor does it have to take an enormous amount of time. Exercise can be done at home with programs like P90X or online yoga. Exercise could be going for a run outside or even a walk with your spouse, kids, or dog. Exercise could be shooting hoops with your friends or doing some fun activities at a local club or facility.
One of my daily habits is to get in 10,000 steps. Research has shown that it can lead to a decrease in chronic diseases such as diabetes.
What is extremely important is that you don’t fall in the trap that you are saving time by not working out. If you don’t work out and exercise, your health will decline.
- When your health declines you will have less energy.
- You will get sick more.
- You will lose more time at work because of sickness and health issues.
- You will not be able to think clearly when you are not in good physical shape.
- Your health expenses will eventually climb significantly because you will be forced to fight chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or others that could have been avoided had you exercised.
Exercise isn’t just about feeling better later and living longer later. It’s about living the best life right now. People that exercise and are in good shape feel healthy, vibrant, and confident. They look good in their work clothes. They have the energy for important items in life that happen outside of work.
When you are super busy at work, try these techniques to get through a rough phase;
- Work out first thing in the morning. By the time your brain figures out what you are doing, it’s all over with. You can go on and do your thing for the rest of the day reaping the rewards and confidence gained from knocking it out early.
- Do exercise that doesn’t feel like exercise. That could include dancing, walking, jogging, bike riding or anything that is more fun than sitting on a machine at the gym. Find what you enjoy doing. For me right now I love Jiu-Jitsu.
- Recruit others to join you. Chances are, if you are swamped at work, so are your teammates. Is there a way you can all go for a walk at lunch together and keep talking/discussing the project? Can you recruit a family member to go for a walk with you so you could spend some time with them while your schedule is maxing out?
- Make use of your lunch hour. This can give you a mid-day boost in energy but it could also prevent you from eating bad foods if everybody else is going out and trying to suppress their anxieties with food and drink. Working out at lunch keeps you moving and often keeps you eating healthier.
“Healthy and fit isn’t a fad or a trend. It is a lifestyle.”
A successful life is built around solid principles of success. Learning to implement those principles with appropriate discipline and habits often takes some time. Give yourself appropriate time to implement sustainable and consistent habits. Trying to flip your life upside down all at once often ends in failure. The important thing is to just keep making small incremental changes that add up week after week and month after month.
Do what is sustainable. If something positive is sustainable, it can be done consistently. If something can be done consistently then momentum can be built. Anything is possible with positive momentum. That’s how remarkable personal transformations are made.
Do I think you can exercise regularly? Yes, I believe in you. Do you know deep down that you are capable of pulling more out of yourself? Yes, you know you can give a little bit more and dig in. You can achieve success and move the ball forward as long as you are taking steps in the right direction making progress bit by bit. Your goal today is to improve upon who you were yesterday. If you do that, there’s no telling how far you can go.